Luke Plunkett

It took over 200 years for the population of Australia to reach 22 million. It's taken CityVille, the latest game from Farmville creators Zynga, just eleven days.

That's right. Twenty-two million in eleven days. While detractors of this type of casual Facebook gaming can point to the fact most of those players haven't paid a cent, and that it's a lot easier to get 22 million signed up to a browser game than to go out and buy a "real" one, that doesn't diminish the scale of 22 million players.

CityVille is basically SimCity for the microtransaction Facebook crowd. You can read more about it here.